Stéphane Bressan

Late Peter Naur coined the Danish and Swedish translation of “computer science” as the neologism “datalogi”. The term and its English version “Datalogy” are Anglicism constructed from the English word “data” and the English suffix “-logy”, meaning “science”. “Datalogy” is therefore by construction a synonym of “data science”. Currently, “Datalogy” is rather used as a synonym of “data analysis”. Looking further into the its apparent etymology, “datalogy” unfortunately looks like the composition of the Latin word “data” (feminine participle of the verb “given”), meaning "given", and the Greek word logos (λογος) meaning “word” or “discourse”. As such it suggest the science or study of data. A more coherent construction, using a Greek root, would be “dedomenology”, with the Greek verb “didomi” (δίδωμι) meaning “give” and its participle “dedomenon” (“δεδομένον”).

We use the term “dedomenology” to refer to the study of the issues related to the search, extraction, collection and cleaning, integration and fusion, analysis, anonymization and dissemination of data.